The rapid growth of the effective medical knowledge base makes it difficult for health care providers to keep apprised of best practices and effectively deliver quality care. This is especially true for treatment techniques, medication, and testing procedures, which are continuously being developed. Moreover, proper health management is not only sought for humans but also for animals since pet owners are not only concerned with their own health but also with that of their pet.
Computer-based decision support systems have been developed to address these issues. However, known decision support systems take a broad range of variables as input and provide outputs that fail to precisely address a specific medical problem. For instance, such systems output lists of possibilities for diagnoses, treatments, and additional tests for rule outs, from which a user attempts to select an appropriate treatment.
Veterinarians experience significant time constraints in diagnosing and treating patients and there is currently lacking a comprehensive, up-to-date, evidence-based resource for immediate and effective access.
There is therefore a need for an improved veterinary decision support system and comprehensive web-based reference source.